Amazon has soothed developers miffed at the notorious variability of its rentable servers with a new expensive class of reliable instances.
The "I2" instances were officially launched by Amazon on Friday after being previewed at its AWS re:invent show in November, and see the company bring SSD-backed servers with fast …

Well, I've had three Corvettes, one each of the last three generations, hoping they would finally make a real US sports car, no luck. Much like regular AWS services, the Corvette is expensive, awkward, slow and not suitable for any sort of demanding application.

Real sports car meaning a two seat consumer vehicle configured from the factory as a street legal production version of the race car. Not a sporty car or a sporting car, nor a hot rod or a grand touring car or non-production exotic.

I keep buying them because they keep making real advancements in the vehicles and I would really, really, really like to see a US built sports car that wasn't a pile of shit. You can't actually know what you're getting until you've put a few thousand miles on a car.

I'm somewhat nostalgic about when extended duration races with marginally practical production vehicles actually sold cars and the engineer in me finds a lot to admire in the engineering that goes into a vehicle built and raced as a race car but sold on the same form (except tires, exhaust, roll cage & cockpit fuel cutoff/battery disconnect of course) at scale in a showroom right next to the pickups. That's a difficult thing to do and as an 'American' I would like a US company to be able to do it well. Maybe someday.

De gusitbus non est disputandum (sp?)

Ah well. Your definition is a little more constrained than mine. Actually, I'm a 'roadster' fan, not a 'sport car' person. Two seats and a retractable top is all I ask. My first 'vette showed me that a little power can be fun too.

After you've survived early Lucas electrical systems and SU carbs, you learn to enjoy the advances of modern technology.

Re: De gusitbus non est disputandum (sp?)

Roadsters rock! I'm ridiculously talk and stupidly proportioned though and I always think I look like a giant dick in a car with the top down. Many long times ago I had a '59 Austin Healey Sprite and I loved that car but it was easier for me to peak over the windshield than through it. It was just like a go kart and so much fun to drive and girls loved it :)

Re: FINALLY!!

Seems a bit much...

It looks like the parallella board is slowly coming out

For $60k I could get 9600 cores and 19.2 Teraflops and get to keep them for ever more.

Or possibly get a decent car with decent chassis and a steering wheel that works and put a Corvette body on it and go fast and round the corners we have on roads over here. Though I could probably go half and half and still be up on both deals.

Re: It looks like the parallella board is slowly coming out

Errm, does this include salary for people to look after all that kit, doing it yourself will keep you too busy to work on what ever it is you wanted to run on it. Plus, are you factoring in electricity costs and the rental of a room to keep it all in, plus high speed access to a main internet gateway? No...thought not....

Re: I can't help but wonder...

Re: I can't help but wonder...

Those are all good questions. Maybe there really is a viable market... To be honest though it just sounds like one of those types of things that inevitably pop up when there's a lot of VC money to be had from recently funded startups.

There's an entire business model that's built around preying on the inexperienced business person. Unfortunately, it's a very effective thing to do. The majority of businesses fall down because they can't determine what actually has value and what doesn't. A company can have the greatest product ever and the best IT systems and the smoothest internal operations you've ever seen and most will still fail. Those things are only about 1/3 of running a business. The rest can't be taught, it has to be learned and there's only one way to learn it. (Incidentally that principal is why the same idiots always seem to be able to raise money. There's a lot of positive things to be said for someone who tried and failed, a lot more than you can say about someone who never tried).

Anyway, products like this are very appealing to those who have raised money but don't yet know business: 'BIG POWER' is always an easy sell to a certain group. It's like office furniture. The inexperienced think somehow that fancy chairs and desks will make their business better and they spend their money on that instead of things with value.

As an office furniture aside, a few years ago I decided to upgrade all the office decor but there was no fucking way I was paying what the knob from Herman Miller was asking. I waited and watched and an auction in Destin, Florida was selling the furniture from a failed startup. So I flew down, bought all 80 Aeron Chairs and 40 'task centers' (desks) and had them trucked back to DC for less than $7,000 for everything. Including the booze I drank, the plane, rental car and the hotel. The furniture was less than a year old, was fully optioned and some of the chairs were still in crates, all for less than the Herman Miller rep wanted for two chairs and a desk. I kept some of the chairs and desks and now I give them to small startups we've invested in. I'll be damned if they're going to spend my money on high end furniture. You don't deserve that until you've made your own money. When you get there you can decide if that's really where you see value. It's a lot different when it's your money.

Re: I can't help but wonder...

Got my Aeron the same way -- failed startup, selling to the (rented) walls. Picked up the Aeron for $200, Wish I would have bought their server rack as well (pair of quad-CPU IBM POWER systems, IIRC), but they were running AIX (spit!) and I didn't want to spend an indeterminate amount of time trying to make them palatable.

Good value

...compared to what my employer is paying for relatively small VM slices running on something much smaller than that. Ah the delights of the shared services model... Costs three times as much, three times as slow and takes three days to get anything changed on it as you don't have permission to touch your own servers. Still it keeps people in jobs yeh?

Cost efficiency

The [$59,743] cost is roughly equivalent to six reasonably well-specced Dell PowerEdge R910 servers with 64GB of RAM and two ten-core Xeon E7-4850 processors

So that's £36,568 at today's exchange rate. And the "medium usage" reserved instance would work out to £17,059.

By comparison, a PowerEdge server with this configuration would set you back £21,230.92. Six of them would be £127,385.52. That's the equivalent of 7.5 years' Amazon I2 "medium usage" RI use. And, as you point out, that's "[...]not including the electricity and other infrastructure bills" - which will be substantial.

So, yes, it's about the cost of a Cadillac, if you were daft enough to use a year's worth on pay-on-demand - which you should be sacked for if you even considered as an option. It's slightly less than half of a Caddy if you bought the Reserved Instance. Compare that to four Caddies if you were to buy the hardware yourself. Plus a Mini or two to cover the electricity, housing and network costs.

As far as I can tell, the article's subtitle should be, "Big numbers scare me." Because anyone who's deeply involved in corporate computing works with these kinds of numbers daily - and to them (and me) the Amazon proposition looks like good value, unless you're desperate for capex tax write-down...and a P45 (or pink slip, for our American readers) too.

Re: Cost efficiency

Because amazon is not offering vanity/consumer goods like corvettes here, they want to sell this to business types.

No-one needs big boxes by Dell not yet written off gathering dust in the corner because the project came to an end but the servers and the sysop that comes with it didn't magically disappear. Well, I guess you can sell them on eBay or give them back to Dell for refurbishment, but still...

Btw does anyone know what "1 CPU unit" in amazon speak is? I think it is less than a real CPU ... it may be the "hyperthreaded" peer only.

Re: Cost efficiency

Why thank you, good sir, madam or gender-neutral entity! Have one yourself.

The Compute Unit was defined early in the evolution of AWS. At the time, it had a meaning that was measured against specific hardware. Today's Compute Unit definition's a little more complex, but tweaked to ensure you basically get the same amount of compute power as you did originally. Probably the best definition that's actually useful is "the same as you'd get from an m1.small instance".

What an m1.small is hosted upon these days has almost certainly changed, through several machine room refreshes, from what it was originally, but it's tuned so that you'll get almost exactly the same amount of compute power as you always did.

Expensive

There is an article on Anandtech about server memory that mentions server pricing

(http://www.anandtech.com/show/7479/server-buying-decisions-memory/3)

Quote

An HP DL380 G8 with 24 x 32GB LRDIMMs, two E5-2680v2, two SATA disks and a 10 GbE NIC costs around $26000.

Adding the extra SSDs to match the i2.8xlarge would cost less than $4000 so for less than half the cost of 1 years usage you can get a system with 3 times the memory and 40 virtual cores (20 physical + hyperthreading gives 40) instead of 32. The Amazon system is only suitable for short term peaks - if you need it for more than about 3 months then it will be cheaper to buy your own server.

why is cloud so expensive

IMHO.. Looking at options for 2014/15 infrastructure I reckon for a full time usage profile over 4 years a cloud provision needs to be half the cost that the current companies are asking to compete with buying new servers and a sensibly priced colo. Occasional peak usage is still quite valid for me though.